From version 3.8, the Relatude CMS has built in support for mobile web development. We support two modes; mobile and desktop. Developers who need more granular device support are free to extend or replace our mobile features.
Design rationale for Relatude mobile support
For the Relatude CMS we wanted to make mobile web development as easy as possible still making the CMS light weight not requiring additional installations and system configurations in various files.
Frontend mobile adjustments such as fluid layout and responsive design using CSS3 have become quite popular the last few years and will become more popular with the adoption of Html5. These techniques does not require any backend support in the CMS so we did not see a need for a overly complicated device support system that would make it unnecessarily hard to use and that would considerably increase the size of the Relatude installation package. We also know that very few are willing to spend the resources needed to develop specific versions of the website for more than two target devices (desktop and mobile).
For those who need more comprehensive device support there are other frameworks such as 51degree.mobi, MobileESP and others that you can implement. The Relatude CMS is a web application framework and should make this integration easy.
Although fluid layouts are good for making content wrap nicely on your devices you still often want to use alternative markup to reduce the byte size payload to reduce load time and prevent high data transfer costs on mobile phones. Relatude provides several features to support this development scenario.
Mobile features at a glance
Auto mobile/desktop template switching
Allows you to create completely separate templates for mobile views. This is particularly useful in cases where you want to strip down the output markup to reduce page load time or when you want to provide a completely different look to the mobile version of the site.
API
The IsMobile property can be used to code custom mobile dependent features.
Mobile UI controls
Helps you to hide certain parts from either desktop or mobile views. We have also made a control that will render a link so end users can override default view and switch between desktop and mobile.
What about native mobile apps
We see an increase in the development of native apps for smartphones.
This scenario is also well supported in Relatude with protocols such as OData. Some of our partners use Relatude for editing content and native apps are developed that read content from the CMS using JSON and OData.